Paper Scissors Stone

From a Distance

28 From a Distance The narrator who comes from nowhere sits among us disguised as someone you wouldn’t think would lie. He opens his mouth like a book, picks a story from the so-called ‘mementos of memory’. For ease of future reference, he calls it ‘From a Distance’ like the bird calls at daybreak. But the story is nowhere closer than the horizon, and his memory never slips: ‘It’s near midnight. Someone and his mother are listening to a story on the radio next door. She opens the cupboard full of bags, which opens on more bags. With telephone disconnected, no calls will disturb her husband’s early shift.’ ‘The story,’ he says, ‘is about a home factory nowhere in particular but specific to that someone who is unwilling to forgo the strange memory of his mother’s night shift at home, the memory of her putting thread through a hole that opens on a price tag to be attached to clothes. “Someone might not notice but that’s work.” The way she calls it work implies that there is nowhere like this home, nothing more real than the story 29 of a mother sitting on a wooden stool, telling a story at midnight to her son about work.’ ‘In his memory,’ he says, ‘there is The Buddha of Laughter from Nowhere holding his belly up on the shelf, who opens his big mouth but doesn’t break the silence. He recalls a shadow moving on the street. There’s someone walking home along the lampposts, someone like him, a stranger to any home or story who happens to be feeding thread as the first bird calls the last dawn back, sewing up each hole in memory of the stories on the radio next door. each opens onto a drawer full of bags and price tags.’ ‘Nowhere,’ the narrative opens, ‘is where each story goes.’ After the curtain calls, he imagines someone lost to memory, still looking nowhere. ...